Chaos in Baghdad, New Orleans: revealing America's weakness.

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Trudy Rubin today in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/columnists/12554105.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
There's something ghoulishly fitting about talking by phone to Baghdad while watching the chaos in New Orleans.

In my ear I'm hearing about the absence of electricity or water in 120-degree heat and daily shooting in Baghdad's streets. On CNN, a doctor from New Orleans' Charity Hospital is relating how nurses are giving each other IVs so they can keep working because there's no more water or food. Meanwhile, there's gunfire in the hospital's garage.

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Do we not live in the richest country on earth? How dare anyone claim that it is "playing politics" to ask why officials weren't prepared to cope with this hurricane.

The Baghdad and New Orleans debacles lay bare the dangerous American aversion to long-term planning. Lack of planning for the postwar gave us the current mess in Iraq. Lack of preparedness for a New Orleans flood produced a disaster that makes America look like a Third World country. Offers of help are pouring in from around the world as if we were Bangladeshis; even Cuba offered more than 1,000 doctors.

Who can believe, after the New Orleans fiasco, that the Bush administration is prepared to handle another terrorist outrage? As former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich asked bluntly on Friday: "If we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?"

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